Yet until recently I would be hard put to defend the overall quality of the wines my ancestors drank in Campania, the region of Capri, Naples and the Amalfi Coast.

Prior to my great grandparents’ emigration to America in 1888, they hadn’t a clue what kind of wines they were drinking back in the Old Country, where no one had ever tried to classify one grape from another.

In those days, as in most of Italy, most grapes were self propagating, a condition called “promiscuous cultivation,” and the vines had to compete with other plants for water and nutrients, thereby producing wines of little character. Oxidation was considered characteristic; wine was sold almost exclusively from huge, old, oak barrels.

Even after Italy’s Ministry of Agriculture established its denomination of wine origins in 1963, it was a frustrating job to delineate the distinctions among dozens of Campanian grapes like greco, fiano, falanghina, biancolella and coda di volpe (tail of the wolf).